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2:51 p.m. | Updated The “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy has swept bestseller lists across the country for weeks, revitalized stale marriages and captivated scores of women drawn to its erotic fiction. But in the eyes of some librarians, it’s nothing but pornography.

The Brevard County Public Library system in east central Florida has pulled copies of the books from its shelves after officials decided they were not suitable for public circulation.

“We view this as pornographic material,” Don Walker, a spokesman for the Brevard County government, said in an interview on Friday. “I have not read ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ but I’ve read reviews of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey.’ From what I understand, it’s a lot about male dominance and female submissiveness.”

That is a fair description: the books, by the British author E L James, tell the story of a virginal college student in Seattle who enters into an S&M relationship with a millionaire businessman.

Other books of an erotic nature, including “The Complete Kama Sutra,” “Tropic of Cancer,” “Lolita” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” were available at branches of the Brevard County library, but Mr. Walker said that was because they had already “become part of the societal mainstream.”

Brevard County isn’t the only library to balk at making “Fifty Shades” available to its patrons. The public library in Fond du Lac, Wis., didn’t order the book, citing a “no-erotica” policy.

Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Vintage, the book’s publisher, said that for the most part, libraries have told the publisher that there are “an extraordinary number of holds” on the books – at some libraries, more than 1,000 people were waiting in a virtual line for their turn.

Vintage Books, part of Knopf, released the books as paperbacks last month after they were originally published by a small independent publisher in Australia.